It’s vital that the education summit discussion reflects some realities, even if they are unpalatable to the protagonists.

MONTREAL —The Summit on Higher Education is here.

At last. Monday and Tuesday is when student leaders will be rubbing elbows with university presidents, when union leaders and business leaders will sit around the same table to debate what can be done to save the decaying, drowning university system in Quebec.

It’s a tall order and not many participants going into the summit are confident the process is going to lead to anything concrete.

In fact, most are predicting the whole thing will be a spectacular flop, and it’s a good possibility. Rather than being an open discussion seeking solutions to a crisis in higher education, the summit has been criticized as being a public relations exercise, a bogus consultation that has been preordained to result in indexation and an opportunity to put university presidents on trial for mismanagement.

Others say the summit won’t be conclusive, but is more of a jumping off point. What is known going into this summit is that the financial situation for universities has never been more critical. New cuts announced in December have only made it worse. “We are facing a crisis,” said Heather Munroe-Blum, principal and vice-chancellor of McGill University.

Despite the fact universities say jobs are at stake this time, we’ve spent months debating whether or not universities really are underfunded and we still don’t have a consensus going into the summit.

Gerry Sklavounos, Liberal higher education critic, said it would be far more beneficial if we were going into the summit to address the problem of underfunding and to propose possible solutions to it, rather than continuing what has been a circular debate that promises no resolution.

“The fundamental issue here is the quality of education and the money to support it,” he said.

Students insist the universities have adequate funds but don’t spend them properly, while universities say they are underfunded $850 million a year compared with other provinces.

Students dispute the universities’ calculations and point to issues like contentiously high administrative salaries as proof there is mismanagement. But McGill University, for example, argued that even if all of its senior administration salaries were completely eliminated, the university would save only 0.8 per cent of its total budget — and it spends more than 10 times that amount on student financial support.

Universities have $2.1 billion in accumulated deficit, at least $1.5 billion in deferred maintenance and, as of December, a new budget cut of $124 million for this year and next along with a threat of financial penalties if at least 50 per cent of those cuts aren’t made by April 2014.

No wonder Quebec’s rectors are going into the summit in a foul mood.

Government officials haven’t helped the matter by suggesting they agree with students to some degree, that the problem might be more about management than funding, which probably suits them politically as it removes pressure to come up with the cash.

But outside parties are pointing to an underfunding problem. The Fédération québécoise des professeures et professeurs d’université (FQPPU) recently said the government needs to inject at least $300 million a year into universities to maintain a quality system. Economist Pierre Fortin did a study, presented at the pre-summit, which said universities are underfunded by at least $300 million to $400 million a year.

The Post Graduate Students’ Society of McGill University (PGSS), wanting to understand the situation, analyzed all the financial data and adopted a motion last week saying that it believes universities are underfunded, contrary to the Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec (FEUQ), which represents it.

But instead of a summit focused on solutions, the universities claim they’ve been demonized and will be put on trial.

“The Parti Québécois is laying blame on the universities,” Sklavounos said. “They’re trying to diminish the credibility of the universities, allowing them to take the heat for the problems in the system. Going into this summit, the dice are loaded against our universities.”

The summit has also been haunted by the issue of free tuition. Emboldened by its success in cancelling last year’s tuition hike and helping to bring down the Liberal government, the most militant student group, ASSÉ, subsequently decided a tuition freeze wasn’t enough and has pushed for free tuition.

When the group wasn’t convinced the idea would be seriously considered, even when summoned by Premier Pauline Marois to a private meeting, it decided to boycott the summit and will instead hold a demonstration just after it wraps up on Tuesday afternoon.

“We won’t be part of a consensus that states that free education is not attainable,” said ASSÉ spokesperson Jérémie Bédard-Wien, who said before its success last year that ASSÉ hadn’t really had the courage to push forward with the idea of free education. “We aren’t backing down. The summit is a feeble victory for a six-month strike.”

While it would be easy to dismiss the idea as preposterous, given the province’s huge debt, Quebec’s big labour unions have backed the idea of free tuition and former PQ leader Jacques Parizeau recently supported it as well, so the idea keeps arising and diverting the focus of the summit.

Another indication of a doomed summit is the absolutely universal belief that it will result in a proposal for indexing tuition to the cost of living — an idea that pleases no one. Depending which scenario the PQ would opt for, tuition would rise by about $40 to $80 a year. Indexation has been rejected by the main student federations and deemed negligible by universities, which consider it inadequate to address a decade of underfunding.

According to Bédard-Wien, indexation shouldn’t be seen as a compromise between a tuition increase and a freeze; he views it as a step toward a U.S.-style higher education system that keeps students indebted.

“We want the government to know that indexation will not be a way to stifle confrontation and social movements,” he said. “It’s not a permanent pacifier.”

So far from offering a solution, indexation could spell big trouble for the PQ government if students organize and mobilize to protest against it en masse.

“In the end, the PQ is going to propose some sort of indexation, the students won’t be happy and will slam the door and the rectors might do the same because it doesn’t solve anything for them,” said Stéphane Le Bouyonnec, higher education critic for the Coalition Avenir Québec. “Then the PQ will impose its solution and we’ll see if there’s enough spring in the carré rouge movement to go back to the streets and try to make the government back down again.”

So can this summit solve any of the hot-button issues afflicting Quebec’s universities, or is this much-hyped summit just a precursor to a new season of social unrest and protests?

Much of what will be discussed at the summit will be a rehash of the themes that were discussed in four preparatory meetings since last fall: funding and governance, quality, accessibility and the impact of universities and research on Quebec.

Thousands of pages of documentation have been deposited with the government on all of these subjects, a dizzying array of opinions and analysis submitted for consideration.

Can it all be synthesized, digested and churned into something cohesive that will offer concrete solutions in the day-and-a-half-long summit?

The fact is that much of it is posturing for political purposes, and most positions remain firmly entrenched as they were a year ago, when there seemed to be no compromise that would make everyone even remotely happy.

That, Bédard-Wien said, is exactly why ASSÉ is not going to the summit.

“What’s the point of getting people around the table to talk when they don’t really talk, they just present opposing points of view and then shoot at each other in the crossfire of the media?” he said.

Positions are polarized and, unless someone sprinkles fairy dust over the summit headquarters, it’s not really known how less than two days of discussion can reconcile some of the contradictory viewpoints.

In fact, there is much skepticism about the whole process. Robert Proulx, the newly inducted rector of the Université du Québec à Montréal, said that at the preparatory summits, people were given just a few minutes to speak — not conducive to meaningful dialogue.

Higher Education Minister Pierre Duchesne has issued more of a timetable than an actual agenda, as no one really seems to know what format the summit will take or what propositions, if any, will be tabled. He said the four themes — funding and governance, quality, accessibility and the impact of universities and research on Quebec — will be discussed on the first day, leading into a plenary session on the second day. Perhaps it shows where the government’s priorities are in that the only detail specified about the agenda is that it will all wrap up with a speech by Marois.

There will be 350 people there, including observers and media, but the core group around the table will be 54 partners in education and seven elected officials. More than 50 per cent of that group will be made up of students and professors and unions.

And the debates promise to be similar to what we’ve been hearing for months.

On one side, you have students arguing that a tuition freeze is necessary for accessibility, but on other side are experts arguing that low tuition actually hurts quality and accessibility.

Ross Finnie, an associate professor in the graduate school of public and international affairs at the University of Ottawa, said repeated studies show that cultural factors are much more of a barrier to going to university than financial matters.

“You can march up and down the streets all you want saying keep tuition low, but you’re not going to change much,” he said in an interview.

He understands that it’s easier to see the world in terms of financial barriers, but he said young people are far more influenced by their family’s attitude to education than income or tuition when it comes to going to university. And he cautioned that once you choose the price, you are also choosing the quality.

“The low tuition in Quebec is probably harming both quality and limiting the number of places available,” he said. “Which is obviously not what most of those marching in the street would really want.”

Then there’s differentiation, which the CAQ proposed and would entail students paying different tuition for different programs. It’s an idea that acknowledges some programs, like medicine, cost more to deliver.

No, the student groups said in unison, this is another unacceptable barrier.

But it’s a common concept across Canada, with differentiation fees of 10 to 20 per cent at the undergraduate level between arts and engineering or sciences. The University of Toronto faculty of law, for example, charged almost $28,000 for tuition in 2012-13, while an arts undergraduate degree costs roughly $6,000 per year.

“There’s plenty of precedent for differentiation and, for me, it’s a no-brainer,” said Alex Usher, who leads the Toronto consultancy Higher Education Strategy Associates, although he specified tuition differentiation is often done based on what the market returns will be.

It’s not fair, said Le Bouyonnec, that a political science student pays 40 per cent of the cost of their education, while a medical student pays five to 10 per cent of the cost. The CAQ also proposed allowing the more research-intensive universities — Université de Montréal, McGill, Laval and Sherbrooke — to charge more tuition.

He said increasing their fees by 15 per cent for five years would bring in about $400 million a year “and would solve a big chunk of the universities’ problems.”

To be fair, not only students were opposed to this idea, but also some of the other universities. Proulx said it had the potential to be “catastrophic,” something that could actually destroy the higher education system.

And then there’s the thorny issue of funding.

Fortin, a UQAM professor emeritus, said the Conference of Rectors and Principals of Quebec Universities (CREPUQ) perhaps didn’t take into account that the cost of living is lower in Quebec than other provinces when it calculated that universities are underfunded by $850 million a year. His analysis shows $300 million to $400 million of underfunding in 2009-10 and at least another $100 million for 2010-11.

“Clearly, there is a very serious underfunding problem,” he said. “And clearly, it is sufficient to justify the Liberals’ financing.”

He is a strong advocate for indexation, saying a freeze while the cost of living goes up three per cent a year means that in 10 years universities will be 30 per cent behind.

(Marois was assailed for trying to make this assertion recently, with Sklavounos accusing her of trying to “reinvent the dictionary” where a freeze means a hike and indexation means a freeze.)

Fortin has proposed three models of indexation, but favours the third — and highest at 3.5 per cent per year — because it would stabilize the contribution of a student to the true cost of their university education, but would make it difficult for the government to increase tuition faster than the ability to pay.

“If you increase tuition three per cent a year, no one will notice,” said Fortin, who believes the majority of the population and students would support indexation. “But if you have a freeze followed by a 30 per cent increase in 10 years, it leads to social instability. Really, a freeze could lead to another crisis.”

Which brings us to the million-dollar question: could there be another printemps érable, demonstrations and boycotts of the same magnitude as last year when about 170,000 students boycotted classes for months and about 300,000 marched in protest on March 22?

Much has stayed the same, but much has also changed. For example, a vilified leader — Jean Charest — is no longer in the picture and even with some missteps from the PQ, the party has been embraced as having brought in a tuition freeze (even if only temporarily) and having kept a promise to listen to students and all partners in higher education.

If indexation is indeed the result of the summit, that will still mean a much smaller increase than the original $325 a year for five years the Liberals proposed. Will students be willing to jeopardize their school year and march over about fifty bucks a year?

“I think it’s unlikely students will mobilize to the same degree as last year over a small increase,” Usher said. “But once you get in the habit of going out, it gets easier to go out every once in a while.”

And there is strike fatigue to consider and the risk that a boycott over a small increase could make the students lose credibility. So maybe students will walk over indexation, as ASSÉ said it is prepared to do, but it’s a risk.

Also, that united front of last year is gone. The FEUQ and the Fédération étudiante collégiale du Québec (FECQ) don’t support ASSÉ’s desire for free education, although all are opposed to indexation.

In fact, students might have lost their taste for protest, judging by a recent turn of events when five CEGEPs, including two ASSÉ strongholds — the Collège de Valleyfield and CEGEP du Vieux Montréal — rejected a day of protests during the summit.

Also, students from opposing views are asserting their positions rather than meekly joining the silent majority. For example, students and alumni of HEC Montréal banded together this week to issue a statement that they were worried about the underfunding of Quebec’s universities.

“Nothing will happen at that summit and we don’t think it’s the right direction to keep blaming universities,” said Nassim Gasmi, head of the alumni group. “We’re worried about losing our best teachers and the value of our degree in the marketplace.”

Similarly, the Students’ Representative Council at Bishop’s University issued a call for leadership on the eve of the summit, saying funding issues are reality, not myth, and more funding is needed.

The association also blasted FEUQ for pushing for a special commission to study university financing, saying it will merely prolong the process and further hinder an injection of badly needed funds into universities.

“The longer this debate goes on, the more students will suffer,” president Adam Peabody said.

McGill’s PGSS, while supporting some of the FEUQ’s positions, also took an opposing stand on the issue of funding because it doesn’t believe provoking a debate about mismanagement is constructive. “There have been efforts to demonize the universities,” PGSS president Jonathan Mooney said. “This is the wrong strategy. We need to focus on what will create a healthy financial situation for Quebec universities.”

He said the only long-term sustainable solution is an injection of funds, although the PGSS does agree with the FEUQ’s demand for a commission overseeing financing.

“It’s clear these are issues that are very sensitive to Quebec society and if we don’t approach them with due care we could be caught up in another social crisis,” Mooney said. “The government needs to take a hard look at whether universities have sufficient funding to fulfill their responsibilities.”

FEUQ president Martine Desjardins discounted this so-called dissension among student groups, saying independent associations like Bishop’s and HEC didn’t support the boycott last year, either. And she is still adamant that universities “need to prove that more money is needed” but also concedes that a strike would be a last resort.

“When you ask students to go on strike, you need to prove you’ve done everything else,” she said.

Last year’s protests came after students had been imploring the government for two years to abort its planned tuition hike. Desjardins said while the FEUQ, which represents 125,000 students, remains opposed to indexation, it doesn’t mean a proposal for indexation will result in immediate protests, although she said they will “ramp up” pressure.

So while there is no question this summit is a watershed moment for Quebec society, it is not a given that a summit that doesn’t deliver — or delivers the wrong message — will necessarily lead to marching in the streets.

And while much of the focus has been on what the summit will achieve concerning university tuition, for many the real issue that must be addressed at this summit is whether Quebec universities as we know them can be saved.